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Novelo Rectangle

The girl in the photo on her wall blinked. That’s how it all began.&nbsp;But, if you ask me, the whole tragedy happened because of those crazy eyes; yes, it was all because of those eyes. I told them all about it, explaining it again and again. You, reading this story, treat it surely just as a piece of writing, with the sole purpose of amusing you. Anyway, at some point, it was a real case, and my fear was a real fear, creeping up on me every time I saw those crazy eyes! Frustrated, I was, when I pointed out the truth to them all, and they called me mad, called me insane, called me…But you, dear reader, surely begin to notice me speaking with much exaltation, which must be the proof that I’m telling you the truth. Listen to the story; however, you might not want it to burn into your memory too profoundly, for its dark and wicked ways might overwhelm you. You will decide with your own eyes if the story that I recount may convince you that the paper barrier between us is, in fact, only in your head (just behind your eyes).	‘The girl in the photo on my wall blinked.’ That was the first thing She exclaimed upon seeing me that evening. Her once beguiling, now rather grotesque and gaunt countenance, her pale, almost greyish-white eyes opened as widely as they would in a fish’s head, creating the image, which will haunt me for the rest of my, hopefully, not too prolonged life. When She conveyed her improbable story to me, agitated, I could observe hideous red scleral veins corded underneath her eyelids, tainting the whites of her eyes like a red fog. ‘Well, I thought, the eyes were not the most beautiful thing from the very beginning.’ I saw them for the first time approximately three days after they had installed this device in her. All She said was that She had found a suitable doctor, who, on the other hand, had found a suitable donor. ‘Donor?’ I cried, disgusted, as you, my devoted Listener, may imagine. For it is one thing to let that strange foreign practitioner install a mechanical prosthesis in your body, but to take it from some passed individual is a poor luck at best and an atrocious and scandalous mistake at worst. If She asked me, I would tell her so from the beginning. Recall what older and wiser folk say about eyes being mirrors to your very soul? Maybe they are not exactly the heavy pine doorways my paternal aunt Gertha had in her second basement, but certainly, there is a grain of truth in this saying. It was the devil’s work. All the more so, taking into consideration what happened to that poor girl, especially thinking of…	What, the experiment, you are asking? Oh dear reader, I thought I had already told you about it. Maybe you are all too young to have heard stories about these things. For you see, some people still whisper tales of when the Venetians crossed the town. You must know that right after the war, they left the sinking city to vanish among the other lands forevermore.	In those days, a long time ago, I was an ugly, shapeless child turning into an unattractive, shapeless girl (or something of this manner). Barely had I welcomed my unhappy womanhood, I already carried an embryo which would later turn into an equally unhappy human being. Being the youngest of thirteen children in a poor country home, I quickly found my sense of life in earning money, which my drunken husband would later drink off. Desperate, during the war, I found a place as a helper in the groundkeeper’s home. They forcibly took the old countess’ house and the entire plot and lived there for about a decade, when I joined. The Manor - that's where I met Her. There lived three women at the time in the Manor, and all of them were dead by the end of July. However, only one of them was buried with the eye device, or so everybody claimed. The family and servants agreed not to disclose which lady of the house had brought the calamity upon the family, so that the city would not hold a grudge against that particular girl, prayers would be offered for all three women, and life would continue. If you ask me, though, I think they were afraid of grave diggers. These nastiest of all thieves were plundering the graves even when my grandfather was young. And the seeing device, except for the donor’s eye, also included gold and diamonds, which are very valuable, as you can easily envision.&nbsp;	A few weeks before I had come to work, the groundskeeper — already old by then, but seemingly still licentious- decided to marry a young girl from the nearby village. And you do not need to be a scholar to know it seldom ends well. The girl was very young, even younger than her future daughter-in-law, the wife of one of his sons living in the Manor. Perhaps due to her young age, She was still quite naive and malleable, and She depended heavily on the opinions of others.	The girl, I will not utter her name, for I believe the dead must have their peace, was as exquisite as diffident. Pallid and fair-haired. She had the most splendid, somber eyes, unfortunately useless. She was blind from birth and lived a life of shadows. She once explained to me that it was a severe case of congenital blindness, caused by an infection her mother endured during pregnancy. Speaking the whole truth to you, my reader, I must say I heard about it from the folks downtown. People talk about what they hear and add half of what they imagine to spread the rumors themselves. The infection, however, was caused by an unsuccessful abortion attempt, when Her mother drank poison to get rid of a seed of sin. Well, I don’t think even the poor girl knew for sure what was truly a reason for her sorry condition. And yet, the condition itself was what prompted her to agree with that devilish doctor’s proposition. I figured that was all She needed to be happy. The family, which was more of a burden than a protection, was left behind; the older husband mostly left her alone, and still, She had never seen the world around her, so She had to conjecture the shape of everything, relying solely on her imagination.	Indeed, indeed, that is when it all started to look very strange, when She accepted the offer to take part in the experiment. Oh, the light is flickering. This lamp is older than my artificial teeth, and gods know I have lost mine early. I have a terrible sweet tooth, you see. Kha-kha-kha-kha! In any manner, its butter-yellow reflection on the mahogany table, together with a simmer of the embers, is the most adequate setting to talk about loathsome deeds, don’t you agree?&nbsp;	What I want to say…When the Venetians arrived at our ports, there was among them one notable man named Brugia. He was a doctor, surgeon, philosopher, philanthropist, and, what is perhaps the key to understanding the story I tell you, experimentalist. Not old, not young, he picked his clientele himself. He was a well-off self-made man; however, nobody has the faintest idea where his fortune comes from. Rather intriguing was that he rarely accepted visits from the higher-class folk. I saw him myself a few times, when he strolled around the docks, observing intently and exchanging a word even with the nastiest of scumbugs in the darker districts of the city. He didn’t seem to be very keen on earning money, you know? Anyway, due to his extraordinarily advanced methods, he was not popular in the medical world, either. He was criticized for increasing the use of machinery in medical practice. At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, people were well aware of the existence of prostheses. They were widely used during times of conflict as a substitute for lost limbs, such as a leg or an arm. Despite that, Brugia wanted to go further. First, he aimed to make the implant bionic and as natural-looking as possible. Therefore, he experimented with the pigs’ skin, for it resembled the human equivalent to the highest degree. He also used silicone, surgical iron, and elements that were only known to him. The word goes he didn’t trust even his oldest assistants. Some of them said he was a satanist and had signed a pact with the devil. Brugia’s prostheses were good enough for people to pay a lot of money for them, but they were not good enough for their inventor. He wanted to turn the most broken, beaten, and destroyed body and redo it anew.&nbsp;	Brugia, driven by his obsession and passion to do more as a doctor, to be more powerful than a god, was challenged. He had yet to devise a prototype of an optic nerve that would successfully connect an eye to the brain. He found an attempt to design a mechanical eyeball wasteful, though. Once he realised that the transplanted organ from another individual is much more likely to interact with the artificial nerve, the endeavor consumed the majority of his time. He had become more renowned at that time and even published a series of articles.&nbsp;	I read some of them one afternoon, when the doctor came to visit Her in the Manor. It had been raining the whole day, I recall clearly, since I was disturbed a time and time again to wipe the muddy stains from the floors in the hall. While I was serving hot coffee, I heard them talking about it. He was soliloquing on the special requirements that must be met for the transplantation to be successful, and how the recipient, donor, and device must suit each other immaculately. According to him, the woman donating the eyeballs died in peace and blessed the person who was going to receive them. He had not said what happened to that woman, though. Considering how everything ended, I may have an idea.&nbsp;	Some weeks later, when She came back home from his private practitioner's rooms, She had a single strip of white bandage with two dark circles of blood on her face. The circles resembled two bloody moons. Brugia, accompanying Her, stated that the wounds were fresh and they may bleed as they heal. I was not allowed to change the bandage; one of the doctor’s assistants was assigned to stay with Her for this reason. She was mostly quiet and seemed to be filled with patience, awaiting her sight. They say hell is made of loneliness, and her exile was about to end; She was coming into the light to share the world as seen by the others. After a dozen days, Brugia returned personally to take off the surgical dressing. The Manor, in its wholeness, was excited to witness the results. The old patriarch was not as much interested in his wife’s happiness as he was glad She was no longer a handicap. Had he met a more beautiful girl without a disability, he would have married her immediately. It was, therefore, quite profitable that his young wife took it upon herself to be even more agreeable as his companion in the eyes of society.&nbsp;	The whole family and every servant gathered around her bed. She raised her back slowly and stiffly. The skin around the eyes was irritated and reddish, the eyelids a bit swollen; however, her face looked perfectly normal to me. The sole difference I was able to point out, dear Reader, was the colour of her irises. They seemed more intense than natural, and maybe a little bigger. The eyes looked like glass balls in a doll’s head. Over the following days, I discovered that her pupils stayed the same size. The image of the eyes resembling jet-black sources is chilling me to this day. It would not be merry to meet her in a dark corridor at night, you who read this. I could tell that everyone was rather disgusted or spooked by the eyes, although they were not ugly per se. I was the only person who visited Her during the days when She spent Her whole time in Her chambers. The old man visited only at night.	She said She could see everything, but now I think that no one ever thought to ask how She sees things, what She sees. What was a normal thing to see? I can assure you, it was not what a human morality considers ordinary. For the eyes remembered, but they remembered the wrong woman.&nbsp;	She began to have nightmares of people hanging from her ceiling, of people in the walls, of people trying to tear her body to pieces and crawl out of it. She saw and heard people everywhere. During dinner, She kept asking about the knocking. “Who’s that? Who’s the visitor?”. She began to experience fits of anger, convinced that all of the servants mocked her. She stopped coming out of her Manor wing. One evening, She whispered, horrified, “Your faces disgust me”. The old man and his family decided to give her space and lock her in her rooms, so that not a soul could witness her sorry condition. At that time, it was harmless auditory hallucinations. I remember her walking for hours along the walls muttering to herself, “We must feed the cat, we must feed the cat.” Well, we did not house any pets back then, especially the cats, since the old man hated them.&nbsp;&nbsp;	Not long after those happenings, I kept hearing her conversing with somebody. I visited her late at night, delivering her water and other necessities. That was when She said: “The girl in the photo on my wall blinked”. I turned around to see the old photograph. It depicted the first wife of the groundkeeper as a young girl. The picture must have been taken right after she was married off. I did not have time to think about it when She cried, “She keeps saying the most devilish of things!”	She smashed all of the mirrors, explaining that She doesn’t want them to go out. “Who, madame?” I made a mistake in asking, because She approached me in the blink of an eye and put her face so close to mine that our eyelashes mixed. Then, She wailed with the whole strength of her lungs. I immediately ran. After that occurrence, I went to talk with her husband about how much the young madame's health had deteriorated. I was convinced it was because of the transplantation and begged him to contact the doctor. I remember his fat face in the color of ashes when he answered that he sent multiple letters to the physician, for: ‘He does not enjoy seeing his wife going mad, either’. Brugia, in any case, was unobtainable. No one has lived at the address that he shared with us, and no one at the docks could help us to find him. It was like he had never existed. The groundkeeper decided to treat it as a fleeting flu, waiting for it to pass, leaving his wife alone at that time. He did not want to listen to me any further. “You and your sick obsession! The eyes are just the eyes. Maybe there is something wrong with you, even more than with Her!”.&nbsp;	Of course, he changed his mind one evening when we heard a horrible scream coming from Her rooms. The one screaming was the wife of one of the sons living in the Manor. Her face was covered in blood, and Her fingers were sunk into the flesh. She was screaming about the girl from the photo, making her do this. Terrified, we tried to release the other woman, however vainly. Before we knew it, her head was pushed on the marble tea table, creating a deep wound. Like that, the woman was dead. But She has not calmed down yet. She was attacking each one of us. Her eyes were intense and furious. She was spitting blood and throwing herself at the walls. You must have seen it, Reader. It was as if She could not stand to be in her own body. Before I could understand what was going on, She grabbed the younger daughter of the groundkeeper in a tight embrace. Then, She threw both herself and the body in her arms out through the window.&nbsp;	The younger girl fell first, her body softened the impact for my Madame. She was conscious, looking at the night sky, tormented. While we knelt around her, She managed to whisper something, although I couldn’t hear what. She was lying like that for long moments. 	When She had finally stopped breathing, the servants and even the groundskeeper and his family breathed a sigh of relief. They made the proper arrangements, and not long after, the cold, white body rested in a rowan coffin, draped in an ivory shroud. We received the information that Brugia had left the city, and no one knew where or even when he had disappeared. They did not organise a night watch, for they saw no point in supervising the corpse. It was only I who sat by her then. Observing her, terrified and shaken. I was not convinced that those damn eyes would wake her even in death! The moon shone brightly, deepening every shadow with an eerie outline. Cold wind rattled my hair, although all the windows were shut and only dark branches knocked at the glass panes. Right then… Right then, dear&nbsp; Reader, I had a thought. It came to me suddenly, horrifying and disgusting. I very slowly raised the shroud from her face… Up, then down down down. Her very light hair moved with the breeze from the sickest of winds. Her forehead was perfectly smooth, paper-like. Then… Oh God! Oh my dearest… I cannot bear to see it all over again in my memories. For, dear Reader, when I looked at her face… There was no face. From above, the lips spread themselves into one grand, disgusting wound. The moonlight caught on something silvery in the place where there should be Her eyes. It was the pieces of metal that were part of the prosthesis. I could not look for too long. Half of her face consisted of spoiled, rotten flesh with crawling insects. And the eye device? It was gone! All that was left were two giant voids, calling you to witness the thresholds of hell. Look down, and see it with your own eyes.&nbsp;

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Those Crazy Eyes

3Milia.KM

Emilia Maroszek

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Those Crazy Eyes

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Emilia Maroszek

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